Why Reviews are Important
I never used to pay much attention to Google or Yelp reviews. I knew they existed, but I had mentally put them into the same category as the Better Business Bureau. As long as there were no complaints, that would be a good thing, right?
Wrong. About a year ago I began encouraging my clients to leave reviews – good or bad (hopefully good, of course) – I needed/wanted the feedback. I only had four reviews on Google and two on Yelp at the time. A review on Google, I surmised, might be valuable to my SEO (search engine optimization), and if I were to compete for placement on page one, I was going to need more reviews.
Within a year, my number of reviews for Newsome’s Studio went up from four to 48 on Google, and lifted to about a dozen on Yelp – all Five Stars (thank goodness). My ranking began climbing from obscurity to making more appearances on page one as well. It’s difficult to say how much credit can be given to the reviews because I’d made changes in a host of areas that were designed to improve my ranking, but I’m going to give credit to them for the following reason…
Clients READ Reviews
On more than enough occasions during the past six months, I’ve had new clients tell me that they’d vetted several photographers, and the reason they selected me was because of my reviews. They saw that there were lots of them, they were all five stars, and the comments that accompanied them were genuine – not canned, as though they were fake reviews planted by a cheap SEO company (yes, that happens… you can buy “likes” on your Facebook posts, and you can buy “reviews” for your business… sadly).
Conclusion
I’m going to summarize with this… Reviews may or may not help your SEO (but I’m betting they do, after all, Google and Yelp want the freshest content on the net to show up on page one). As long as my clients are happy and are leaving me reviews with great testimonials, then I have one more cylinder firing to push me up the ranking ladder. The fact that they are all five star reviews, tells my potential clients that there’s a darn good chance they’re going to be happy too. One drives the other, and they both work to my advantage. I want my clients to be happy. I want my clients to tell others how happy they were. And I want Google and Yelp to credit me for those efforts, and I believe they do.